Viswanathan K's Thoughts

One of the reasons for picking Malaysia for our year end vacation was that it offered visa on arrival. And the scheme was expiring by the end of the year (2024). A lot (and I mean a lot) of Indians were thinking the same(!) and so clearing Malaysian immigration took a long time as they had to check everyone’s documents (bank statements, return tickets etc), not an already issued visa.   We got a taste of how much Malaysia values tourism upon landing in Kuala Lumpur (or KL as the locals call it). Upon disembarking from the flight, they give every passenger a welcome kit, which thoughtfully included a power adaptor and a USB charging cable (for the phone). Accompanied by a cheerful namaste .   From KL, we took a flight to an archipelago of 99 islands called Langkawi. We went go to the Langkawi Wildlife Park. You can literally feed the birds off your hand. There’s even a python that you can drape around your shoulders for a great photo op, though we were too scared. For ...

Today, almost every kid uses ChatGPT or similar AI to do homework and assignments that involve research and writeups where there is no right or prescribed answer.   I’ve read several articles that ask the pre-ChatGPT era folks whether (1) they can remember even one such assignment they did ever having any use in real life? And (2) Since the answer to that is almost certainly No, what is the harm if kids today use ChatGPT for such assignments?   One counterpoint to the “what is the harm” is that it was never the specifics of any such assignment that was useful in life. Rather, its intent and benefit was to teach one how to search for information, cross-check multiple sources, and then how to collate things into a meaningful answer.   Paul Graham writes of another problem with kids (and adults) using ChatGPT to frame entire articles and long form answers. Writing well, he says, is a skill relevant to most workplaces and it isn’t easy. But now, hey, we can all u...

Karthik Muralidharan has a chapter on the healthcare system in India in Accelerating India’s Development . Unsurprisingly, across India, the majority of healthcare providers are private players.   In the private sector, both in rural areas and in poorer urban areas, the private sector practitioners are not MBBS qualified. “How then do they learn what to do?” By being in roles like compounder, ward boys or assistants. Many also “learn” from pharma representatives who tell what medicines do as well as their dosages. You’d think the pharma guys would exaggerate the effectiveness, but that tendency is balanced by their need to maintain long term relations. Overall, the private providers do have a decent amount of medical knowledge.   How effective are these unqualified practitioners? At least for primary care, they are comparable to MBBS doctors. But as things get complex, an MBBS is definitely better. How to measure the effectiveness of medical practitioners isn’t ob...

From present day perspective, it is astonishing how far west Buddhism had spread, as William Dalrymple describes in The Golden Road . Most of us probably didn’t know that were such gigantic statues of Buddha in Afghanistan until the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas. But Buddhism had spread even beyond Afghanistan at its peak.   In 2022, archaeologists in Berenike on the Red Sea found the head and torso of a magnificent Buddha in the storeroom of an Isis temple (Egyptian god). The statue hadn’t been transported from India – it was made of stone found in Turkey and was in a combo of styles – part Indian, part Roman-Egyptian. In that same temple, they found a stone memorial of the trinity of Hindu gods. There were also bilingual inscriptions in Greek and Sanskrit. Indian influence had spread very wide indeed.   The trade between Egypt and India was enormous. How do we know this? From the tax records of the Romans (who ruled Egypt). While sea travel and trade had its...

In The Golden Road , William Dalrymple mentions something strange - No Buddhist text or inscription survives from the times before Ashoka and Kalinga. (Dalrymple snarkily contrasts Ashoka’s “I am sorry” with other rulers from that time to present day, who will never acknowledge a mistake or express regret). But once Ashoka embraced Buddhism, a “waterfall” of records cascade from Kandahar to the Deccan. Ashoka was to Buddhism’s spread what Constantine was to Christianity’s, he writes.   But post-Ashoka, Buddhism never spread by any ruler’s recommendation or by the sword. “Instead, perhaps counter-intuitively for a faith that embraced poverty and renunciation as an ideal, it was spread around the globe most effectively by wealthy merchants engaged in trade.” For many Buddhists, wealth “could be taken as a sign of good karma ” and “poverty could be interpreted as a sign of moral failure”!   At the famous caves of Ajanta, the Buddha is shown less in his “monastic mil...

There is this joke about a dairy farmer wanting to maximize his cow’s milk production. So the farmer goes to a physicist who comes back with a stack of impressive looking equations and says, “Well, first assume a spherical cow…”   At first sight, it just sounds like yet another theoretical simplification to the point of absurdity. But there is a lot to this “spherical-cow philosophy”, writes Sean Carroll in The Biggest Ideas in the Universe 1 . Specifically in how physics is done: “Idealize a difficult problem down to a simple one by ignoring as many complications as you can. Get an answer to the simple problem. Then put the complications back in and calculate how they affect the answer to the simple problem.”   Physics is famous for this method e.g. ignore friction, build an idea, then add friction into it. For no apparent reason, this technique works in physics. Even though it obviously does not work in so many other fields: “In fields like biology and economic...